I currently have a problem that for my senior year, I need to choose 5 elective courses out of 20+ possible courses. All these courses are distributed to weekdays. I need to develop a robust algorithm to show me all possible combinations without overlapping any of the course hours. I am a little bit short of time, so I figured I'd ask here, and it would be of help to other people in the future.
My original idea was to try all combinations of 5 out of 20+, and remove the schedules that had overlapping courses. The brute force solution seems easy to implement. Just out of curiosity, would there be another more intelligent solution to this problem? e.g. What if I had 1000+ courses to choose from?
A little bit faster could be to select the first course (out of 1000) and remove all the courses that overlap. Then select the 2nd course out of the remaining courses and remove the overlapping courses again. If you do that 5 times, you will have 5 courses that don't overlap.
The last iteration isn't really necessary because once you have 4 courses, then every course that's left will not overlap.
By backtracking you will get all the possible course combinations. An efficient way of backtracking here could be by using dancing links as proposed by Knuth.
Related
I have already programmed a football manager game some years ago with a lot functionality (Sent it to Gamestar for free publishing but was rejected because of copyrights).
I have one section in the game on that I am not really satisfied because I have no clue what would be the best fit to model it.
I have a vector of pairs for all days of one calendar year:
std::vector<std::pair<Competition*, TDate>> year_plan;
E.g. there can be following entries inside pointing to a Competion class instance and a date:
CHAMPIONS_LEAGUE_DRAW, 12.03.2022
CHAMPIONS_LEAGUE, 15.03.2022
FIRST_LEAGUE, 19.03.2022
SECOND_LEAGUE, 19.03.2022
--> As you can see, there can be several competitions at the same day!
The program logic is just processing the year_plan date by date and takes the action required on the specific competition on simulating results or simulating the draws. This perfectly works, but somehow it does not feel right this way.
For that reason I have two questions on that:
Would it not make more sense to have a one year Calendar class and instances for every Competion occurence in it? (One instance per day is not enough because of having soemtimes more than one competitions per day). This would also allow to store additional information in the instance like counter for the matchday, round etc.
The Competitions I currently have are LeagueCompetions, CupCompetitions, Draws. All these three competitions types have some parts in common but need also special class members and methods. Draw competitions need much less information to be stored. As I need to store the Competition in the Calendar vector / class, I need somehow one class forr all three competition types. Should I use here inheritance approach even I need a specialization of the classes in addition to the common parts?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions
Mauro
At my work we have two systems, one that collects the customers payments automatically every month. And one that manages the memberships of those customers. Sadly our outdated technology doesn’t communicate to each other so we don’t know if a customer actually paid for their membership without manually auditing them.
I’ve been put in charge of this process and boy does it take awhile to do.
I have limited knowledge of C++ and was looking into maybe writing a program to do the comparisons for me.
I have two ideas on how to implement this, and was wondering what you guys thought. If these would be best or if it’s even possible or if there’s a better solution?
Current Setup: We have a list of all members in excel, with how much each should be paying, we then go through the actual money collected and check to make sure everyone’s payment went through and was processed and not declined.
Option 1: have a multi-dimensional array of strings. Read the excel file into this array it would have three Columns, first name, last name, amount they should be paying. This would be put in alphabetical order to help with the searching. I would then export the transactions in css file format and read each line one at a time. When it reads a line it would search the array for the same first and last name. Once found it would take the amount paid confirm it said processed and not declined and if so would subtract it from the customers amount they should be paying. In the end if every customers amount they should be paying is equal to 0 then everyone paid.
Option 2: is similar to option 1 just instead of using a multidimensional array it would use two css files. And not put the items into the array at the start.
Thoughts? Is this a smart way to combat this problem? I’m a newbie programmer so I’m just looking for suggestions/advice.
Your solutions would work, but are suited for small datasets. I don't now what your constraints are, but I think that a more elegant solution would be to setup a database on the first system first(instead of the excel file).
Are you allowed to create a database? How many customers are in the excel file?
I have asked a few questions related to this personal project of mine already on this platform, and this should be the last one since I am so close to finishing. Below is the link to a mock example spreadsheet I've created, which mimics what my actual project does but it contains less sensitive information and is also smaller in size.
Mock Spreadsheet
Basic rundown of the spreadsheet:
Pulls data from a master schedule which is controlled/edited by another party into the Master Schedule tab.
In the columns adjacent to the imported data, an array formula expands the master schedule by classroom in case some of the time slots designate multiple rooms. Additional formulas adjust the date, start time, and end time to be capped within the current day's 24-hour period. The start time of each class is also made to be an hour earlier.
In the Room Schedule tab, an hourly calendar is created based on the room number in the first column, and only corresponds to the current day.
I have tested the spreadsheet extensively with multiple scenarios, and I'm happy with how everything works except for the calculation time. I figured the two volatile functions I use would take some processing time just by themselves, and I certainly didn't expect this to be lightning-fast especially without using a script, but the project that I am actually implementing this method for is much larger and takes a very long time to update. The purpose of this spreadsheet is to allow users to find an open room and "reserve" it by clicking the checkbox next to it (which will consequently color the entire row red) allowing everyone else to know that it is now taken.
I'd like to know if there is any way to optimize / speed up my spreadsheet, or to not update it every time a checkbox is clicked and instead update it "manually", similar to what OP is asking here. I am not familiar with Apps Script nor am I well-versed in writing code overall, but I am willing to learn - I just need a push in the right direction since I am going into this blind. I know the number of formulas in the Room Schedule tab is probably working against me yet I am so close to what I wanted the final product to be, so any help or insight is greatly appreciated!
Feel free to ask any questions if I didn't explain this well enough.
to speed up things you should avoid usage of the same formulae per each row and make use of arrayformulas. for example:
=IF(AND(TEXT(K3,"m/d")<>$A$1,(M3-L3)<0),K3+1,K3+0)
=ARRAYFORMULA(IF(K3:K<>"",
IF((TEXT(K3:K, "m/d")<>$A$1)*((M3:M-L3:L)<0), K3:K+1, K3:K+0), ))
=IF(AND(TEXT(K3,"m/d")=$A$1,(M3-L3)<0),TIMEVALUE("11:59:59 PM"),M3+0)
=ARRAYFORMULA(IF(K3:K<>"",
IF((TEXT(K3,"m/d")=$A$1)*((M3-L3)<0), TIMEVALUE("11:59:59 PM"), M3:M+0), ))
Few days now I've got new project to do related with a "real world modelling" program.
Here's how it looks like:
A visit to a psychologist (Use queue). Experts provides psychologist's advice, some of them (n) forms therapeutic groups of k people (GrT - duration of group therapy in hours), other experts (m) takes individual patients (InT - duration of individual therapy in hours). Each newly came patient (new patient's appearance probability is p1, recurring patients comes after period of time (h)) can choose to go to a psychologist providing individual therapies, or to group therapies. If group therapy session is full, patients who are wishing to participate in group sessions must wait. Recurring patients wishing to go to group sessions can start a session with smaller group, but can't go to same session with newly came patients. It has been observed that patients who took individual therapy are recovering faster than those, who chose group sessions(they will need less sessions), but there are exceptions - due to social interaction factor, some patients (probability p2) recover h percent faster than those, who choose individual therapy. Individual session costs InC, group session GrC. You need to assess what therapeutic approach patient should choose optimizing with their resources, and how many and what specialists should hire a health care facility.
Here's my approach to this problem:
Read text file containing Names, Surnames, money willing to spend and place everything in queue structure.
Find which group is better for patient by generating random number for p2probability and using it, we'll find if patient recover faster in individual or group therapy. IMO factor sequence here: Money(looking, if patient can afford individual therapy sessions) > p2 (should patient take group sessions if it's better for him).
By looking how many patients there are in queue, we can find how many psychologists we'll need. (Are there any other factors here? What if we are short of experts?)
Problems that I can't understand: how do I implement p1 probability of new patients appearance if I write every patient into a text file and put them in a queue? How many therapy sessions does it take for patient to recover (static number?)?
Am I missing something? Basically it's open question and there could be no right answer. If anyone have any suggestions how to build this program to better one, I'd be glad to take it!
Programming language I'm using: C++
If you want to break up a task, analyse it and prepare it for coding, you could :
Firstly make a Block diagram, representing program flow control.
Followed by Pseudo code implementation.
P.S. update the question following the above and when you reach the "code stage", there, definitely, will be more help.
I need to create a stats sheet that records the amount of touchdowns performed by a certain team. I have it working for the first round when it records all 8 teams, however in the semifinals since only 4 teams make it, it does not keep track of what index the winning teams were on and just couts the stats in a regular order from 0 - 4. Ive been thinking for a couple days now on how I could possibly overcome this but I havent been able to find a solution yet.
the stats table that is outputted
Please let me know if i can contribute anymore information to make my question less vague and easier for you to understand. I appreciate all the help, thank you.